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[Commentary] © 2003 Philip Hyde, The Timesizing Wire™, Box 622 Cambridge MA 02143 USA (617) 623-8080

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Work-Related Suicides from January to April, 2003

4/25/2003  work-related murder & suicide in the news -

• Actress is shot by ex-fiancé, who then kills himself, by Shaila Dewan, NYT, A29.
  ...The shootings took place outside the woman's apartment in Chinatown [NYC] in front of her visiting mother. Friends said yesteray that the woman, Lyric Benson, 22, was being kept alive at Bellevue Hospital Center so that her organs could be donated. ...Her tall, apron-clad form and fresh face are visible throughout the city on an American Express advertisement for the coming TriBeCa Film Festival.
  On Wednesday night, she and her mother,..who was visiting from North Carolina, shared a dessert..\..at the SoHo bistro Balthazar, \where\ Ms. Benson...worked as a hostess.... After her shift, the police said, she called her apartment and asked her mother to come downstairs and let her into the building, at 211 East Broadway. Just as her mother appeared in a bathrobe and opened the door, a neighbor said, Ms. Benson was shot by Robert Ambrosino, 32, who the police said used an unlicensed .45-caliber Starfire pistol in the shooting....
  Ms. Benson had been dating Mr. Ambrosino since before she graduated from Yale last May, but broke off their engagement about two months ago and moved out of their apartment in...Brooklyn.... Afterward [she] grew nervous and had even sought to speak to a former girlfriend of his..\.. She [had] met Mr. Ambrosino when she called a radio station to make a [song] request [and] he answered the phone. Soon [he] became the charming older man in a white suit and ponytail. \He\ was in the US merchant marine and had been unemployed for about a year, the police said....
  [We allow our business leaders to fool around with unemployment and the chaos it unleashes (viz. forced part-time, premature retirement, welfare, disability, prisons...). They exclude millions of Americans from self-support with their unacknowledged clash between worksaving technology and virtually unregulated working hours. Now we allow our political leaders to fool around with war, and the chaos it unleashes. We're really gettin' suicidal instead of cutting the crap and designing better lives for ourselves. Timesizing would be a first step that with one program would solve or soften the most entrenched problems around the nation and the world.]

• Iraqi general [Hazem al-Rawi] says 4,000 volunteered for suicide attacks ...offer suicide bombings - Volunteers are said to come from 23 Arab countries, by John Burns, NYT, front page & B7.
  [This represents a pretty massive failure of current economic theory to provide full employment and hope for everyone, in both the Arab world and in the US and UK. Americans and Brits are jumping at the chance of education and a job via the military, making them vulnerable if by any remote chance we get a religious fanatic and an unscrupulous businessman usurping the Presidency and Vice Presidency of this great nation, and they start doing first strikes against any nations at peace where they think they can get away with it, regardless of the risk to the lives of the often idealistic but otherwise unemployed kids who joined up because the uncapped concentration of wealth has starved the job opportunities away from them. And people in the comparatively poor and weak Arab world try to defend themselves in the only way they can see. How much more intelligent to just share the vanishing work, and cut the makework, military or otherwise. Indeed, in the wake of this disastrous turn in American foreign and war policy, thanks to a usurping oil junta in the White House and many many very stupid very rich people who supported them, literally millions of people all over the world have turned their attention to one big question, How can the USA be stopped? This is definitely in the running for the title of the biggest foreign relations disaster in American history. There is now no security in this world for any American - until Cheney, Bush and the whole White House-full of spiders is swept clean and we can return to normalcy.]

• A Dutch nurse is found guilty of killing four, by Marlise Simons, NYT, A8.
  A Dutch nurse...Lucy de Berk..\..was sentenced to life in prison [yester]day for murdering four of her patients and trying to kill three others with high doses of drugs.... Ms. de Berk's victims, the court said, were 3 children and an elderly woman in her care at different hospitals in The Hague.... The nurse, who insisted she was innocent and wanted only to do good [hey, just like Dubya in this "war of liberation"!], had been charged with killing 13 patients altogether. But the judges ruled that 9 cases had not been proved beyond reasonable doubt.
  The children Ms. de Berk was accused of killing had serious physical abnormalities and the elderly woman was gravely ill.
  [Ah, the temptation to terminate "misfits," without asking them. Hey, just like misfit Saddam Hussein! - who has serious mental abnormalities and is gravely mentally ill. Cheney and George W. are just practicing eugenics on an international scale! They are "practicing international eugenicists"! - possibly ahead of their time except for their own innocent victims. Consider, would not Saddam call his victims "collateral damage" as well?! Bush and Cheney and Condie and Rummy & "team", and now Powell and Blair, want to set up an international eugenics practice - gotta get rid of a whole list of "undemocratic" countries - their list, not the countries' own. This very apt comparison gives us an inkling of how easy it is for humans to get too sophisticated, to go too far, to get too clever. As our old Hebrew professor (William Ewart Staples at Victoria College, Toronto) used to say, "Laddies, evil is complex, goodness is simple; so evil is interesting, goodness is boring." Guess that's why Canadians, relative to Americans, are boring. Or as Jesous Nazarenos put it, "Wide is the way, and broad the path that leads to destruction. But narrow the way and tight the gate that leads to life." Funny, once you get started on that narrow balancing path though, you get fascinated, not bored, with how different people have managed the balancing act. But it's like technical writing - the more successful you are, the easier it seems (tho it ain't necessarily easy).]
  The case has drawn much attention in the Netherlands, the first country where doctor-assisted suicide has been legalized under certain conditions.
  [Yeah, but in doctor-assisted suicide, the "victims" want to die. We humans spend altogether too much time frustrating what one another wants, especially in this matter of saying the big goodby. We'll never be free for life till we're free from it. In other words, we'll never radically extend life until we get a lot less obsessive, and more common sensical, about trying to keep people alive regardless of quality of life as they themselves see it.]
  More than 100 people gave depositions in the case. The portrait drawn was of a troubled woman who emigrated with her alcoholic parents to Canada [oh yeah, go ahead, blame Canada], then returned to The Hague, her hometown [a "Hague hag"?]. to become a nurse....
  [How does timesizing relate to a disaster like this, where we're talking about the Netherlands which already has pretty short working hours? We think a case can be made for the idea that if people's common interest was embodied in a more obvious and widespread institution than seniority, or a more meaningful institution than universal suffrage, say, for example, a common workweek range, with clear emphasis on self-support (and it don't matter HOW handicapped or "flawed" you are - if your self-supporting it's nobody's business but your own - and you can reproduce like a rabbit as well because we're trying to maximize variability and that translates into sustainable harmonious diversity that's not costing or interfering-with anyone else - so "flawed" people can become an asset because they bring a different viewpoint to the table that might be crucial in, say, planning for the constrained lifestyle of very long space flights - if Stephen Hawking can support himself and his technology with his acute degree of disability, almost anyone can, and in the very long term, all that the principles of ecological sustainability and extendability require us to interdict for people who, given every opportunity, still can't support themselves and their technology {and we can't count R&D and startup-technology costs} is reproduction, not life itself. This backs off one large degree from St. Paul's stark stricture, "If any will not work, neither shall he eat" (II Thess.3:10), while making work itself much easier in terms of the worktime-range per person required for a good living under the homeostatic Timesizing-response to mountainously cumulating worksavings borne by incessant waves of technology.)]

• One dies in attack at U.S. camp; Soldier is held, by Jim Dwyer, NYT, front page.
  KUWAIT...- In an apparent fratricide attack, one soldier was killed and 13 others were injured early this morning when grenades were thrown and shots were fired into a tent used by leaders of a brigade from the 101st Airborne Division, military officials said.
  "An American soldier is in custody," [said] Maj. Trey Cate, a spokesman for the division. Major Cate...described him [as - 2d omission in 2 lines, NYT proofreader - calm down] a sergeant attached to an engineering unit, an American citizen, and a Muslim convert.
  [The notorious "Zeal of the Recent Convert."]
  He was found in a scud bunker when senior officers took a headcount after the attack. The attack took place at 1:21 this morning at Camp Pennsylvania, where soldiers from the First Brigade were sleeping. The tent was in a "command and control area" for the brigade, which was poised to move later today into Iraq as part of the 2nd wave of ground troops from the 101st.... Between one and four grenades were used in the attack, Major Cate said. The explosions in the middle of the night, after 2 full days of scud alerts and attacks, created a chaotic scene of smoke, alarm, and cries for help....
  [Followup -]
  The suspect - Army offers a few details and a theory of motivation - A sergeant is described by the Army as having an 'attitude problem', by Peter Kilborn with Diana Schemo, 3/24/2003 NYT, B10.
  The soldier suspected of killing a fellow soldier and wounding 15 others was identified today as Sgt. Asan Akbar.... The Tennessean, a Nashville newspaper, reported today on its website that Sgt. Akbar was named Mark Fidel Kools at his birth but that his mother changed his name to Hasan Akbar when he was a boy.... As a soldier of the 326th Engineer Battalion, Sgt. Akbar was responsible for clearing land mines, razor wire, and other obstacles to the division's advance. [He] grew up in Baton Rouge and in Southern California. \His\ stepfather, William Bilal...said..."I remember last Christmas he was complaining about the double standards in the military.... Hasan told me it was difficult for a black man to get rank in the military, and he was having a hard time." \But\ George Heath, the deputy public affairs officer at Ft. Campbell, the division's base...said Sgt. Akbar had been in the Army long enough to have attained the rank of sergeant and to have commanded 4 to 8 men.... Asked about a motive for the attack, [Mr. Heath] said, "I've heard some people say it may have been retribution."... The Pentagon identified the soldier killed as Capt. Christopher Seifert, 27....

1. Farmer protest shuts offices and stokes capital jitters, by Christopher Marquis, NYT, A18.
   WASHINGTON...- A disgruntled tobacco farmer who claimed to have explosives kept scores of police at bay [yester]day for a second day from his tractor in a pond on the Mall, shutting down 3 federal buildings and snarling rush-hour traffic in the center of the capital.... The standoff began around noon on Monday when Mr. Watson drove a jeep pulling a tractor on a trailer over the sidewalk on Constitution Avenue and into the small pond..\.. Talks with the farmer, Dwight W. Watson, 50, of Whitakers NC were under way as authorities said they were willing to wait him out, even as they scrambled to reroute traffic and enforce a 300-yard perimeter around his vehicles....
   After warning police that he was prepared to explode a bomb [made of] ammonium nitrate, a component of fertilizer, which was used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing..\..he spent the night in his partly submerged tractor, occasionally lowering his window to wave an American flag. The standoff, within several blocks of the White House, was the latest source of unease in a city already anxious about the potential for a terrorist attack as [Cheney] moves toward war.... Mr. Watson told reporters he was protesting reductions in federal subsidies to tobacco farmers. In a telephone call to the Washington Post [yester]day, he described himself as "broke" and said he was going to "get my message out or die trying."...
   [So it goes in a world that has headed down the deadend of unsustainable straining for gov't-subsidized makework - even unhealthy makework like manufacturing smokes - instead of sustainably relaxing into simple private-sector sharework, sharing and spreading to all who need to self-support the vanishing human employment as worksaving technology advances and population grows.]
   [Followup -]
   Farmer leaves tractor, ending a standoff in Washington - Chaos by lone man bewilders Capital, by Christopher Marquis, 3/20/2003 NYT, A22.

2. Gunmen kills 3, then himself, at American oil rig in Yemen, by Jane Perlez, NYT, A11.
   DOHA, Qatar...- A Yemeni gunman shot dead 3 workers [yester]day at an American oil rig in northern Yemen, according to a spokesman for the rig's supervisor, Hunt Oil Co. of Dallas. The assault, which left an American, a Canadian and a Yemeni dead, ended when the assailant shot himself, the company said. Another Canadian worker was wounded....
   The two Canadians who were shot were employed by the rig's owner, Nabors Drilling USA of Dallas, one of the nation's biggest oil drilling contractors. Siegfried Meissner, the president of Nabors, said the gunman had worked as a carpenter with the company for 9 years. Mr. Meissner said he believed the attack was a "stand-alone event" unrelated to Al Qaeda or any organized...group....

• Student's suicide leads Czechs to bout of soul-searching, by Peter Green, NYT, A4.
  PRAGUE -...Zdenek Adamec [was] an introverted 18-year-old with straight A's and no friends. He led a remarkably unremarkable life.
  [No he didn't. His life was remarkable for "no friends" and for no limits on working, and it's a wakeup call on how unbalanced our lives have become that this reporter sees nothing remarkable here -]
  He lived with his Catholic parents, came straight home from classes at the technical highschool near his home 60 miles outside Prague and spent nearly all of his time working with computers and reading about electricity and electronics.... He played no sports at school..\..
  Mr. Adamec's death...and his suicide note have struck a chord in a country increasingly nervous about the future, with a weak government, a stagnant economy and rising unemployment. ...Said Jaroslava Moserova, a senator..."There is a great feeling of despair arising among young people today." Mr. Adamec left behind a confused note blaming the state of the world, contemporary Czech society and a raft of personal problems.... "I am another victim of the 'democratic' system, where it is not people who decide, but power and money," Mr. Adamec wrote. ..."Drugs, violence, money and power - these are the passwords of our 'civilization,'" he said.
  ...The day before Mr. Adamec left home to kill himself, a newspaper reported that the police had threatened [him] with 2 years in prison \because they\ suspected [he] might be linked to a group of hackers called "darkers" who used computer and e.e. skills to break into the controls of electrical power lines and black out whole neighborhoods.... That pushed him over the edge, his father, Zdenek Adamec Sr., said in an interview at the family's small apartment in a concrete panel building in the tidy lower-middle-class town of Humpolec..\.. In his farewell letter, Mr. Adamec said he had tried to do someone a favor with his computer programming skills and had become the pawn of a "terrorist organization"..\..
  Last Thursday, after nearly 24 hours spent wandering around Prague, he made his way to the soot-stained balustrade of the National Museum, doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. A passing policeman tried to put out the flames with a fire extinguisher, but Mr. Adamec died in an ambulance 40 minutes later. ...The spot where [he] chose to die was less than a dozen steps from a small bump of paving stone and a wooden cross embedded in the sidewalk that mark the spot where 34-years ago, another young Czech, 19-year-old Jan Palach, burned himself to death...to protest the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and the ensuing crackdown....
  [Followup]
  Another Czech dies in growing string of self-immolations, Agence France-Presse via 4/09/2003 NYT, A7.
  A 43-year-old Czech man has committed suicide by setting himself on fire in a village outside Prague, in the 6th such self-immolation since early March, the police said today.... The man, who was known to be mentally unbalanced, had been scheduled to start a prison sentence soon, according to the police..\.. After dousing himself with a liter of gasoline, he set himself on fire in front of his partner [business?? romantic??] and several others in the village of Velka Chyska, 60 miles from Prague....
  Since March 6, five other Czechs have committed or attempted suicide by fire as a gesture of political protest. Three died, and two are in critical condition with severe burns.
  [Isn't it less painful to just take pills, or for that matter, to just vote? - and no less meaningless?]
  Of the 3 who died, 2 left notes to "protest against the evil generally tolerated in the whole world" and "dissatisfaction with the world today," particularly with the war in Iraq.
  [More "collateral damage."]
  In 1969, 2 Czech students, Jan Palach and Jan Zajic, committed suicide to protest the occupation of their country by Soviet troops and the Communist Party's abandonment of nascent democratic reforms demanded during the 1968 Prague Spring movement.
  [Yeah, that was a real downer. Phil Hyde was over in Prague the previous spring and you could sort of feel excitement building in the air. He followed Dubcek's career in the following months with great hope. He wept when the Russian tanks rolled in and squashed everything in the name of liberation. But then, Americans are doing it to themselves today and they didn't need hundreds of Russian tanks - just 19 Arab guys with boxcutters, American flying lessons and a lotta luck! Hey, maybe it wasn't luck. Maybe there really is something to this Islam stuff. Whoo-oo-oo. And there were two (2) entire fields of this "luck" - the "luck" of the vulnerable architecture and engineering of the World Trade towers, and the "luck" of an American administration who would make big military mountains out of this boxcutter molehill. "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"]
  Jan Palach has been celebrated as a national hero since.
  {What about Jan Zajic? And why are they telling us all these names and they haven't even told us the name of the guy who just did it in Velka Chyska?? Guess this is the Czech way of trying to check the Cheney insanity.]

1. Bitterness follows French chef's death - Country [questions] its food critics, by Craig Smith, NYT, A3.
   SAULIEU, France - ...Bernard Loiseau...one of the country's most celebrated chefs, was found dead beside a hunting rifle in his village home here on Monday. Within hours, France's haute society was abuzz with speculation over the reasons for his death, apparently a suicide.
   Mr. Loiseau's death followed the downgrading of his highly rated restaurant here by the influential and respected Gault-Millau restaurant guide and suggestions that it was in danger of losing one of the 3 stars awarded it by the all-powerful red Michelin Guide. Such downgrades in the past have driven chefs to desperate acts.
   But Mr. Loiseau, 52, was also facing falling profits and exhaustion, his associates say....
   [Evidently not someone who was practicing the new French 35-hour workweek.]

2. Gunman kills four at Alabama job agency, AP via NYT, A21.
   HUNTSVILLE, Ala...- A man looking for work opened fire [yester]day at a temporary employment agency in an argument over a CD player, killing four fellow jobseekers [Billy Knox Sr 61 & Jr 22, Ben Ferguson 47, David Seiler 46] and wounding a fifth, the police said.
   [America's mass murderers, careless nightclub owners and cellphone-using drivers et al. are doing more than any terrorists. And now, desperately seeking war with Iraq - out of the blue - America is its own worst enemy.]
   Hours later, officials said, the gunman surrendered after a standoff at his apartment, where the police had tracked him down using the address he had put on his job applications. The authorities had turned off the building's electricity in near-freezing temperatures. The man was identified as Emanuel Burl Patterson, 23.
   [Young, but from the photo, huge.]
   The police said the man shot at officers early in the standoff. The killings took place about 6:30 am in the lobby of Labor Ready Inc., where as many as 15 people were gathered, waiting for work.... Michael Tucker Jr. said his father was in the office and told him the argument "was all over something about CD's and $20." They were pushing him, laughing at him," he said. "They pushed him into a corner"..\..
   [Sounds like the classic story of Dr. Frankenstein's would-be gentle 'monster'.]
   Mr. Patterson regularly went to the office looking for work and was known to employees and other laborers..\..said a police spokesman, Wendell Johnson.... "People who know him say he is a very unstable individual," Mr. Johnson said....
   Patricia Johnson, 38, told The Huntsville Times that the gunman turned his handgun on her and pulled the trigger, but the weapon did not fire. She ran into a closet where 3-4 people were [already] hiding.
   Three people were dead at the scene and a fourth died in surgery. The police said the wounded man was hit in the leg....
   Labor Ready, based in Tacoma, Wash., describes itself as the nation's largest provider of temporary manual labor for light industry and small businesses.
   [We need to quantify the astronomical hidden costs of maintaining a vast un- and under-employed population of financially anxious people because of FDR's terrible decision - in 1933 - to go with makework instead of sharework - straining, too little too late, to create busywork instead of just spreading around the vanishing still-unautomated market-demanded work. That disastrous decision forced us - and is still forcing us - to offset every new labor-saving technology with makework - barring access forever to the most basic kind of freedom and progress = more, financially secure free time. And of course, government has never kept up with creating enough jobs to fill a minimum of 40 hours a week for everyone, so unemployment, official and hidden, has grown ever since. And so have the hidden costs, as this page of work-related violence reveals.]
   The [Huntsville] Labor Ready office is next to a building that houses law enforcement agencies, including state troopers and investigators for the sheriff's department.
   [How convenient.]

• [here's a ti-i-iny little hidden-away item -]
  Russia: Soldier kills 4 comrades, then himself, by Sophia Kishkovsky, NYT, A10.
  [This probably beats beats anything else that we've ever excerpted for danger, and anything else in the news today -]
  A private in Russia's Strategic Missile Forces opened fire in a guardroom of his unit's fuel depot in the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk, killed 4 fellow servicemen, and then killed himself, the Interfax news agency reported. Col. Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov, Commander of the Missile Forces, has reportedly flown to Karsnoyarsk, to investigate. ...Such incidents are becoming frequent in the Russian military,
  [Ohoh, "becoming frequent" in a nuclear-armed military???]
  although they are rare in the Missile Forces.
  [Phew! - we think. Never mind North Korea. Russia probably still has thousands of missiles that can reach the USA, and our popularly unelected Geo. Dubya Bush has unilaterally "flipped the bird" to the ABM Treaty and is pushing hard for a switch to a first-strike precedent, re-raising the specter of M.A.D. (mutual assured destruction) with any number of nuclear-proliferated countries. Guess, realistically, this is the most dangerous time we've lived in. Nuclear weapons all over the world: Russia and one or two other former Soviet countries, North Korea, possibly India and Pakistan, Israel, and most dangerous of all, the USA, ruled by a naive 'innocent' well-intentioned self-righteous madman and his fellow oil-obsessed lunatics. And what's he wanna do? Drop the one policy that has kept us alive the last 50 years - containment. And right now, the suicides in the nuclear-armed Russian military which are "becoming frequent" and occurring rarely but still, occurring, in the Missile Forces are not even on his radar screen. Bush's fronts are -
  • North Korea, which he's got on the back burner even though it can reach us with nuclear force - see "Latest provocation by N. Korea is fighter jet's intrusion," by Sang Hun Choe, AP via Boston Globe, A9 today.
  • Afghanistan, which he's completely messed up
  • Iraq, which he's aching to mess up - "U.S. [= Bush administration] seeks 9 votes from U.N. Council to confront Iraq," by Weisman & Barringer, NYT, front page today - Osama must be la-a-affin'!
  • the West Bank, which our 'client state', i.e., Middle East colony?!, is completely messing up - see "3 Palestinians killed in Israeli manhunt - The [Israeli] army said its Gaza operation was in response to Palestinian rocket fire on Wednesday {which was in response to 40 Israeli tanks scrunching 12 Palestinians in Gaza on Tuesday (2/19/2003 #4) etc etc ad nauseam}," by Steve Weizman, Boston Globe, A8 today, and "Armed with weapons and a will, Palestinian factions plot revenge," by James Bennet, NYT, front page today.
  • the Philippines, which just today, he's beginning to mix-in, see "U.S. combat force of 1,700 is headed to the Philippines - A new anti-terror front - U.S. commandos, not limited to advising, will go after Muslim extremists," by Eric Schmitt, NYT, front page today, or "U.S. mobilizing 3,000 troops to aid Philippines - Force is sent to root out resurgent militant group loosely linked to al Qaeda," by Hookway & Cooper, WSJ, A3. Hell, everyone is linked to al Qaeda if your criteria get loose enough!
    And who needs al Qaeda when our rock bands and nightclubs are this careless and suicidal? - "96 dead in fire ignited by band at Rhode Island club," by Barry & Kershaw, 2/22/2003 NYT, front page - indoor fireworks???
    And followup on the Philippines - "Filipinos awaiting U.S. troops with skepticism," by Seth Mydans, 2/28/2003 NYT, A12.  Very effective skepticism it turns out - "Dispute over label may delay US sweep in Philippines," by John Hendren, LA Times via 2/28/2003 Boston Globe, A12, which states "The two sides cannot agree on how to label the role of the American troops.... Philippine officials...'training exercise'...because of internal political considerations and...constitution{al} restrict{ion}s....  Pentagon officials...'military operation.' "
  • Colombia, which is a proposed mix-in - see "Rebels keeping Colombia on edge - Kidnapping of Americans helps highlight insurgents' strength," by Juan Forero, NYT, A6 today, which states, "Since 1997, Washington has sent...more than $2B.... About 70 American soldiers are currently training Colombian troops to protect an important oil pipeline in the northeast...." (At least Mexico is staying out of Bush's rush to destabilize the universe - "Fox's antiwar stance is straining US[-administration!] ties," by Marion Lloyd, Boston Globe, A12 today - our respect for Mexican President Vincente Fox - his independence and courage - leaps, as it does for French President Jacques Chirac - though Lionel Jospin would surely have done as well).
  and, aside from our ineffectual hunt for Osama and the anthrax mailer, we haven't even begun to think about the danger with the biggest potential of all - and let's generalize this - suicidal depression in the missile forces of the former USSR and the present USA! - given this oil junta's dangerous and radicalized "conservative" Judeo-Christianity. American freedom is being curtailed, eg: freedom of speech, see "Denier of holocaust [Ernst Zundel] is deported to Canada - US move sparks anger," by Colin Nickerson, Boston Globe, A8 today. It's getting strange when there are more serious consequences to denying the partial creedocide of Judaism (6m deaths) than denying the Earth is round (well OK, the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible assumes it's flat), or even that God exists (contra both Hebrew & Christian Bibles), or completely ignoring the partial genocide of the Ukrainians (30m deaths - 1940s) or the Armenians (?m deaths 1910s - "we want memorials for our holocaust too!") or the Irish (?m deaths 1840s - 'we want memorials for our holocausts {Potato Famine} too!") or the American AfroAmericans (?m deaths 1776-1863... - "we want reparations for our holocaust {slavery} too!") or countless other examples going back in history. How long can freedom hold on in the USA, considering the nation's historic susceptibility to witch hunts, such as the Ku Klux Klan of the 1870s, the "red scare" of the early 1920s and the McCarthyism of the early 1950s and the current subtle but devastating penalties that enforce Political Correctness, despite current brave stands on many people's part (with the exception of the "opposition" in Congress with, in turn, a few exceptions such as Dennis Kucinich) - e.g., "New York [State] cool to war," NYT, A26 today, and "Returned Peace Corps volunteers oppose war in Iraq," halfpage ad by *Education for Peace in Iraq Center, NYT, A23 today, and "Trashing the war critics doesn't help - Macho posturing reassures no one," op ed by Molly Ivins, Boston Globe, A19 today, and the Natt Handelsman (Newsday) cartoon right above it, "Mr. President, our intelligence tells us given enough time, his own people may get rid of him" - in the next frame we see that the messenger is actually referring to Bush and addressing Saddam who's holding a paper on the antiwar protests and plummeting Bush polls. Freedom in other pro-Bush, warlust countries is being curtailed - "Spain shuts a Basque newspaper, accusing it of aiding separatists," by Emma Daly, NYT, A8 today. Hooboy. Unless we humanoids look a lot more closely at Gandhi's strategic non-violent resistance instead of revenge or self-righteous policing and missionizing (let alone the real Christianity of "turn the other cheek"), we won't survive the first decade of this new millennium let alone the first century. And of course, it would be real helpful if we started using technology to decrease stress (Timesizing) instead of increasing stress (downsizing). Back to the suicide article -]
  Brutal hazing by superiors has usually been the cause.
  [You mean they've solved the problem of No Pay?]

• Some workers in China use suicide threats to collect pay - 'These workers know the official channels don't work well, but as soon as they threaten to jump, they get attention' - labor researcher, by Philip Pan, Washington Post via Boston Globe, A8.
  GUANGZHOU, China -...Suicide threats by workers seeking to collect unpaid wages have become increasingly common in many parts of China, a sign of the frustrations felt by the nation's working class as the ruling Communist Party presses ahead to build a market economy while limiting political reform.
  [Humm, work without pay. Sounds like slavery is creeping back in China too.]
  The phenomenon is concentrated largely among the nearly 200m workers who have left China's impoverished countryside for jobs in the cities. And it is most pronounced in the winter weeks before the lunar New Year, when these laborers collect their earnings and migrate to their villages.
  In the run-up to the holiday this year - it began Feb. 1 - local Chinese newspapers carried several reports about workers "treating their lives lightly" in disputes over wage arrears, sometimes with photos of men perched precariously on towering construction cranes. In central Hubei province, one worker spent 6 hours threatening to leap from a crane before getting his money. In eastern Shandong province, another set himself on fire.
  Because most such incidents go unreported by China's state-run media, it is difficult to say how often they occur or how most are resolved. But one Chinese labor researcher who has studied the subject estimates that at least 100 migrant workers, most in construction, threaten to kill themselves over unpaid wages each year in just the Pearl River Delta, the manufacturing region that includes this booming city 75 miles northwest of Hong Kong.... A survey published recently by the official New China News Agency found that nearly 3 in 4 migrant workers have trouble collecting their pay..\..
  For 6 frustrating months, Yao Xinde had been trying to get one of this southern Chinese city's largest and best-connected construction firms to pay him and his crew of 80 workers for fitting the interior fo the peach-tiled..\..student dormitory he helped build.... Now, the 40-year-old foreman and a colleague were threatening to throw themselves off the building if they didn't get their money.... Two tense hours later, officers accompanied one of the firm's managers to the roof with a package of cash wrapped in newsprint. Police passed the money to Yao and his friend, then pulled them to safety....

1. Focus: Wife battles company greed after husband's suicide, by Yukiko Toyoda, Kyodo 01/27/03 20:14 EST via AOLNews.
   (EDS: This is the second of a 5-part series on suicide, a subject some members of the families involved talked openly about) [we missed the first of the series - ed.]
   TOKYO...- Noriko Takizawa learned on the morning of Jan. 23, 1996 that her husband had leaped to his death. After her son went to sleep that night, she walked to a pedestrian overpass spanning a road near her home. "Should I follow him to be on his side?" Takizawa (not her real name) asked herself, but decided not to take her own life because of her [18-year-old] son, who was preparing for his university entrance examination.
   Her husband Yoshio (not his real name) was 54 years old and an active executive at an electric work contractor. But it became clear that something was wrong with him 9 months before he killed himself, at a time when a company client of his had failed to pay 30 million yen in a business transaction. ...The company blamed [him] for failing to perceive that the deal he had concluded would end up with the money due being uncollectable.
   Takizawa worked hard negotiating with the client to get the money but then suffered a stroke. As soon as he was released from hospital he returned to work, leaving home around 7 am and coming back at 11 pm.
   [Hmm, 16 hours doorstep to doorstep. With, say, a ½-hr commute each way, that's a 15-hour day and a 75-hour workweek ... assuming he wasn't working weekends.]
   He was still unable to get the money. Then he began to lose his appetite and could not sleep well. The couple started spending the night in separate rooms after he said he did not want to trouble her. She said she often hear the sound of the television and the newspaper he was reading.
   He died without leaving any note.... His family and the company he worked for jointly held the funeral, where the company took all the cash offered to the family.
   [Another result of grotesque Japanese and global labor surplus caused by frozen 1940s-level statutory workweeks and productive of employee powerlessness, flaccid pay and persistent recession.]
   Mrs. Takizawa said the company also tried to deduct about 1.7m yen from his retirement pay, it had been [us]ing for his business expenses. She started negotiations with the company in an effort to obtain his full retirement payment.
   Meanwhile, she landed an office cleaning job. She had to dispose of heavy paper trash but was told not to use the elevator [huh?]. It was around that time that she had to get tranquilizers because she began to develop facial twitches. The pills made her sleepy and affected her work. She started having hallucinations in which she saw her husband. She also developed a palate disorder and could not eat well, losing 5 kilograms and becoming unable to work.
   She wrote a letter to a newspaper, saying that "I am beginning to lose my courage to live because I could not get the proper amount of my husband's retirement pay and employees' accident compensation insurance (for his death)." A lawyer read her letter and decided to take up her husband's case as a suicide resulting from overwork. She took part in the compensation negotiations with the company and attended hearings conducted by the Labor Standard Inspection Office. In December 2001, just prior to the 7th anniversary of his death, the office recognized that Takizawa "died of suicide due to depression resulting from overwork."
   [- making his widow eligible for more financial help from the government? What about the company holding the employee liable for risks he took on its behalf?]
   The company still says it has "nothing to say."
   [And presumably "nothing to pay."]

2. China's coal miners risk danger for a better wage - ...Miners' fatal accidents averaged 10 a day in 2002, by Joseph Kahn, NYT, A3.
   XHONGYANG, China -...Becoming a coal miner in China is less a career choice than an act of desperation. It is a job for the poor who calculate that the income, however modest..\..- few men earn more than $150 a month -...outweighs the likeliest of injury and the constant specter of death. China began shart mining at least 1,800 years ago and now produces more coal than any other country, about 1.3B metric tons a year. The Chinese coal industry also has few rivals in the number of miners killed and maimed on the job. According to China's official statistics, 6,121 people died in mines last year, 8% more than in 2001.... Mining is dangerous everywhere, but a Chinese miner is more likely to die on the job than miners in almost any other country. Last year 4.7 Chinese miners were killed for every million metric tons of coal produced. The only higher reported rate was in Ukraine, at 8 miners per million metric tons. A Chinese miner is 117 times more likely to be killed at work than an American miner....
   Many more miners perish uncounted in prosaic tunnel collapses, explosions, fires, floods and elevator failures that mine owners never report, Chinese coal experts say. Many mine owners keep their records secret....

3. [and further southeast -]
   In Manila, kidnapping as a business expense, by Wayne Arnold & Carlos Conde, NYT, C1.
   MANILA - For this city's affluent ethnic Chinese business executives, kidnapping has been a fact of life - an almost ritual form of extortion.
   [Clearly with this level of technology, we need a more convincing integration of our common interest than limitless-accumulation capitalism can provide. But if we transish gradually to limit accumulation, first by standardizing and spreading, on an adjustable basis, work per person per time period (= workweek), we begin to galvanize the kind of common interest required with this kind of powerful technology.]
   But in the last year, a trend has emerged that has added to the risks of doing business here. As more criminals are lured by the easy money that kidnapping offers, security experts and lawyers say, kidnapping syndicates are reaching out for victims beyond Filipinos of Chinese extraction, the group that has long pulled the prime economic levers here, to prey upon wealthy families from other backgrounds....
   [Equal opportunity kidnapping. Well, it must be working, - otherwise, it wouldn't be spreading so lucratively.]

• China: Magnate gunned down, by Chris Buckley, NYT, A5.
  One of the country's richest businessmen was shot dead in what the police said might have been a revenge killing. Li Haicang, 47, was shot in the head on Tuesday by a man who burst into his office in the city of Yuncheng, about 120 miles southwest of Beijing. His killer, Feng Yinliang, then shot himself, the police said. Mr. Feng...an old friend of Mr. Li...owned a failed factory and had tried several times to force Mr. Li to buy his factory's land, the New China News Agency reported.
  [Then there's a kinda strange reference -]
  China is rare bright spot at Davos forum, by Christopher Rhoads, WSJ, A10.
  DAVOS, Switzerland - Can China save the world economy?... China reported 8% growth last year..\..
  [Despite deepening rural unemployment and nationwide suicide in China (see below, e.g., 11/29/2002, 11/02/2002), the narrowness of our misleading GDP scoring gives us the illusion that things are wonderful in China.]
  "If we didn't have China I would be suicidal," said Stephen Roach, chief economist with Morgan Stanley....
  [Better get your sleeping pills ready, Steve. The only chance any of us has of avoiding suicide is getting rid of the suicidal strategies
  • of today's right = uncapped accumulation for ME and downsizing for everyone ELSE, and
  • of today's left = makework and micromanagement dba same ol' patronizing, liberal, halfway New Deal aka Keynesianism - that only works in the context of war (FDR) or the threat of war (Hitler, Japan in Manchuria) and still retains the problem of uncapped accumulation = the Chesterton pan-utopian trap (and the liberal rich are sooo much harder to change because they're sooo self-righteous à la noblesse oblige and other subtle forms of "you really want me to have all this extra")
  • and shift to a new technology of sharing = a 'third way.'
  That new sharing technology involves economic design. It involves designing-IN the best goal we have - to maximize the critical variable of all time. It involves starting with the easiest value dimension,
  • which is not money because when you take money away from somebody, it isn't clear what of value you're giving him back.
  • But if we start with work - human compensated employment dba temporary transfer of control of our time - when you take work away from somebody, it is clear that you're giving her back free time, a value in itself. No population that fails to value free time at least as much as work is going to make the grade to the next great stage of human evolution.
  The economic design also involves copying natural homeostatic systems. So there will be no more permanently fixed and arbitrary workweek (ie: share of limited available human worktime per person per time period). The workweek in the next stage of human evolution will vary inversely with unemployment. In other words, overtime will vary directly with "undertime." And of course, overtime and overwork must be designed, either with carrots or sticks or both, to target and trigger their own resolution in terms of training and, if necessary, hiring. This isn't rocket science. It's more like applying common sense, or belaboring the obvious. But sometimes the glaringly obvious is the hardest thing to see, as Robert "Obvious Adams" Updegraf would be the first to remind us. Put your hand up against your face, look through your fingers and stay that way for a few minutes till you forget where your hand is. Then, "where's my hand? where's my hand? - Oh my Gaaawd, I remember" - and peel those huge-looking fingers away from your eyes.]

• First a delicacy, then indelicacies - A tale of infidelity, suicide and caviar, by Leslie Eaton, NYT, A18.
  ...For 5 decades, Caviarteria [on East 59th St in Manhattan] has been a place New Yorkers with a taste for luxurious food have gone to buy beluga, sevruga, smoked salmon and other delicacies. ...To understand the Caviarteria story, you have to go back...to the company's founding by Louis Sobol, Eric and Bruce's father, then perhaps to 1989, when they joined it..\.. Brenda Black Sobol...met her husband [Eric] in 1989, at a billiard parlor in Chelsea.... They were married in February 1991. The next year, Louis Sobol died. His wife Ruth and sons took over the business; though both men were VPs, Eric described himself as CEO, while Bruce was the public face of the company.... In the late 1990s, [Eric] embarked on an aggressive expansion plan, opening Caviarterias in Las Vegas and Florida and more in NYC. ...He and Ms. Black Sobol separated in 1997. But they still worked together, [she] said, adding that she had lent him close to half a million dollars that she received as a settlement after an accident. Her family had been involved in the business, too. Bruce Sobol [her brother-in-law] on the other hand, said in court papers that Ms. Black Sobol "has not been involved in the family business," describing her participation after her separation from Eric as "non-existent."...
  In 1998, the U.S. and other countries took steps to protect the beleaguered beluga and other sturgeon [who produce caviar]. Strict new import permits were required.... In the course of the next few years, some of Eric Sobol's suppliers and competitors were charged with smuggling and were sentenced to prison terms. [Eric] was never involved in a criminal case. But in civil proceedings in late 1998 and early 1999, the Fish & Wildlife inspectors tried to seize hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of his shipments, contending that the paperwork was inadequate and that the caviar was mislabeled. This set off a bitter series of lawsuits in which Mr. Sobol challenged not only the seizures but also the whole DNA testing process. Those cases continue to this day.
  Things only got tougher. In 2000, Mr. Sobol and Ms. Black Sobol filed separate divorce actions. And some of the new Caviarteria locations were not doing well; ...the company's tax returns for fiscal 2001 showed a $2m loss.... On April 16, 2001, the manager of a Friendly's Restaurant in Danville, Pa., found Mr. Sobol's Mercedes in the parking lot.... Mr. Sobol had shot himself in the head using 2 handguns that were licensed to him. He was one month shy of his 40th birthday..\.. Ms. Black Sobol said she believed that the company's financial difficulties drove her husband to take his own life, so that his large insurance policies would cover Caviarteria's debts....
  [Her separation and divorce from him had nothing to do with it? The fact that he had filed for divorce too may mean that he was trying to protect himself from financial claims she was making.]
  She described..\..his suicide...as meticulously planned. ...After his death, she discovered her husband had gotten a new tattoo: "Death Before Dishonor."...
  

1. 1/11   Death in the workplace, editorial, NYT. A32.
   ...A 3-part series in The NY Times this week by David Barstow and Lowell Bergman showed that workplace safety rules are in fact far too weak, and dramatically underenforced. The series looked at the egregious safety record of McWane Inc., a large Alabama-based sewer and water pipe manufacturer. Nine McWane employees have lost their lives in workplace accidents since 1995 [one every year and a couple of extras].
   • One man died when an industrial oven exploded after he was directed to use it to incinerate highly combustible paint.
   • Another was crushed by a conveyor belt that lacked a required protective guard.
   • Federal investigators found that 3 of McWane's 9 deaths were the result of deliberate violations of safety standards.
   • In 5 others, safety lapses were a contributing factor....
   [Wanna kill yourself and you don't want "death by police"? Just go "Work for McWane." Oops, here's another one -]
   2 at hazardous foundry tell of events costing one his legs - Two months after a brutal accident, a pair of workers speak out, by Barstow & Bergman, 1/16/2003 NYT, A16.
   A video shot by a production company in Tyler, Tex., captured this message on a wall at Tyler Pipe, from workers to federal inspectors. [photo caption - the message says TO THE INSPECTORS - HELP]
   2½ months ago, a worker [Guadalupe Garcia Jr.] was crushed by a truck at Tyler Pipe, a sprawling cast-iron foundry in East Texas where 3 [employees] have died and hundreds have been injured since 1995. Doctors amputated both of the worker's legs to save his life....
   [Another pipe company in the American South. Is there a pattern here?]

2. 1/12   Judge: Shooting victims' kin can't sue, AP 01/11/03 06:13 EST via AOLNews.
   HONOLULU - The families of 7 Xerox Corp. employees shot to death by a co-worker [Byran Uyesugi] in 1999 can't sue the company because of the state workers' compensation law, a judge ruled. Circuit Judge Eden Hifo on Friday sided with company attorneys who argued the worst mass shooting in Hawaii history was a workplace incident.... The families argued it was unfair to consider the killings mere workplace injuries.
   [So is it fair to ream companies when an employee goes nuts?]
   In 3 separate lawsuits filed in 2001, Xerox was accused of failing to take sufficient steps to protect the employees...
   [So far we're still with the judge and Xerox, but then...]
   even though company officials knew Uyesugi had anger problems, kept an extensive firearms collection and had told supervisors he was afraid to bring any of the weapons to work for fear he might be tempted to use them.
   [Oops, our sympathies shift - this employee didn't just go nuts without warning. He's been nuts for awhile, as the next sentence indicates. So our focus becomes, what the heck can a company DO in this kind of situation? There are probably millions of employees with anger "problems" and tens of thousands of employees with firearms at home. That narrows it down to the question, what is the appropriate and/or safest response when an employee tells a supervisor that he is "afraid to bring any of the weapons to work for fear he might be tempted to use them." To avoid litigation, you might have to fire him on the spot with no notice on the basis of a veiled general death threat. Suppose you do that and he comes back anyway and blows people (maybe you) away? Chances are you're still going to get sued because they'll find something wrong with your "provocative" drastic response of firing and ushering out the door. So the burden shifts to the litigants to define what would be an appropriate response. Fire, usher out the door, and hire security guards specifically to watch for this guy forever after?]
   The lawsuits also alleged various hospitals, clinics and doctors who treated Uyesugi for mental health problems did not do enough to prevent the shootings.
   [Again, what's "enough"? This leads us to, what's up with a society in which people with "mental health problems" have no problem keeping "an extensive firearms collection"? But as soon as we get up the societal level, we've absolved the company and the hospitals etc. and we're looking more in the direction of the National Rifle Assoc.]
   ..\..The seven were gunned down at a Xerox warehouse by copier repairman Byran Uyesugi, who is serving a life prison term without parole. "The shooting occurred at Xerox's premises during work hours, and everyone involved in this was an employee of Xerox," company attorney Crystal Rose said. Under the law, companies can't be sued for damages if a worker is injured or killed on the job....
   [And obviously they can't be sued if a worker is injured or killed off the job. The whole problem of American litigiousness would make a little more sense if judges and juries had more common sense in terms of limiting awards to costs, "costs" in the case of death meaning current earnings projected to standard retirement age.]

For earlier suicide stories, click on the desired date -